Homegrown. Piotr M. Szpunar
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maneuver involves including violence to property in the definition of (eco)terrorism. The owner of Superior Lumber, the target of one of the arsons with which McGowan was involved, described the destruction of his property as producing a feeling of terror.15 Here, property is intimately tied to one’s body and livelihood, the destruction of which could have devastating impacts. In government hearings, acts of property destruction were regularly compared to murder.16
If not wholly convincing, the movement’s apparent disdain for private property acted as the basis from which arson and vandalism were delineated as fundamentally anti-Western acts, the motivation for which could only have a foreign or un-American source. In a statement to a House Subcommittee hearing on Ecoterrorism and Lawlessness in National Forests, one executive forcefully asserted that the environmentalist movement is
disdainful of fundamental American values, including the rule of law, private property rights, free enterprise, and democracy.… [They] detest American businesses, our free enterprise system, our environmental policies, our use of animals for food and medical research, our judicial system, our elected officials, and many other American institutions and values.17
Others emphasized that radical environmentalists are, in essence, “human-hating treehuggers” who renounce “the view of the Greek philosopher Protagoras that ‘man is the measure of all things.’ ” In effect, they want to “destroy civilization as we know it.”18
Certainly various segments of the environmentalist movement align themselves with “the East”—a largely reappropriated and mythologized notion of a space and culture untouched by technology, which, among other things, speaks to the whiteness of which the movement has repeatedly been accused.19 Various authors within the movement alternatively trace its roots to the Indian Vedas (1500 BC) that denounce the eating of meat, the Jains (circa 500 BC) who wore covers over their mouths so as to not accidentally swallow insects, and, later, Buddhists. Furthermore, they chastise the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in equal measure—for claiming that god gave man dominance over the earth, which they see as the root of “an inherently irrational, exploitative, and destructive [Capitalist] system.”20
Conversely, there is a contingent within the movement that aligns it with the very American philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. They characterize environmentalist thought as the “most recent expressions of the centuries-old minority tradition in Western philosophy” that showcases and embodies the “highest ideals of Western society.”21 Others still connect their lived environment to US nationalism. In the 2011 documentary If a Tree Falls, which documents, in part, McGowan’s story, Bill Barton of the Native Forest Council stumbles upon a felled old-growth tree and longingly muses that it “probably sprouted just about the time Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
To counter the potential that Americans might identify with the movement or its goals, its opponents further characterize the movement as anti-Western by conjuring the brown-Arab-Muslim-other: “They think they are heroes and crusaders for justice, just as the September 11 hijackers thought of themselves in this way.” Moreover, radical environmentalists might prove even more dangerous. The movement’s action against Huntingdon Life Sciences, whose animal testing practices broke various protection laws, succeeded in having financiers divest from the company. In his testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, the company’s counsel claimed that in “attacking the integrity and independence of the US stock market system … [SHAC] had succeeded where Osama bin Laden had failed.” In effect, within the familiar faces of these white Americans exists a “homegrown brand of al-Qaeda,” a threat so dangerous to American interests and values that only a racialized terrorist identity construct could communicate its gravity.22
The Sound of Hate
On the morning of August 5, 2012, Wade Michael Page entered the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek. He opened fire, killing six people. Another four were wounded before he turned his weapon on himself. One victim’s relative recounted the massacre:
It was not the American dream of Prakash Singh, who had only been reunited with his family for a few precious weeks after six years apart. When he heard gunshots that morning, he told his two children to hide in the basement. He saved their lives. When it was over, his children found him lying in a pool of blood. They shook his body and cried “Papa! Get up!” But he was gone.23
After the initial confusion, which included reports of multiple gunmen and that the police had shot Page, details began to emerge about the shooter. He was a US Army veteran whose tattoo-covered body read “like a poster text for white nationalism.”24 Page had been a member of a white power skinhead organization. The Hammerskins—which includes a (self-characterized) clandestine group of supporters called Crew 38—formed in Dallas, Texas, in 1988 and is an integral part of the white power music scene. Himself a guitarist and vocalist in a variety of “hatecore” bands (e.g., Celtic Warrior, Intimidation One, Aggressive Force, Blue Eyed Devils, and End Apathy), Page had been on the radar of various watchdog agencies for some time. The FBI announced early on that it was investigating the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism.25
The United States has an endemic history of both systemic racial oppression as well as hate- and bias-motivated crime that includes intimidation, assault, vandalism, arson, and murder. The racist right to which the Hammerskins are tied is made up of a diverse set of organizations and networks. Sociologists Pete Simi and Robert Futrell divide the movement along four branches—the Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity and neo-Pagan racists, Neo-Nazis, and racist skinheads. While not without their disagreements, conflicts, and debates, these branches have migrated, mixed, and overlapped in a variety of ways. Before the end of the Cold War connections between groups began to solidify under the banner of RaHoWa (Racial Holy War), facilitating the movement of individuals and iconography between groups. For example, the contemporary KKK is involved in the racist music scene and has itself “Nazified” through the adoption of Neo-Nazi symbols. Also, in the mid- to late 1980s skinheads began to incorporate Nazi ideals and were themselves recruited into other groups. The Hammerskins are a part of this mixture. It is perhaps ironic that one of their founding members met Tom Metzger (founder of the White Aryan Resistance) during a taping of the Oprah Winfrey Show (February 4, 1988), which led to increased connections between the groups as well as the more active presence of the Hammerskins in the white supremacist movement as a whole.26
The distinction between hate crimes and terrorism is difficult to ascertain. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for instance, does not have a strict protocol regarding the distinct use of each term. Rather, it follows the FBI definition of “hate crime” and labels attacks it feels are politically motivated as terrorism on a case-by-case basis, admitting that there can be overlap.27 Perhaps the crucial difference is to be found in the communicative aspect of terrorism. That is, one might hypothetically murder someone of a particular race, for example, motivated by prejudices one personally holds, and perhaps without the intent of sending a message to a broader audience. However, this distinction is problematic. First, divorcing personal prejudice from broader political, social, and cultural contexts is difficult if not altogether questionable. Second, a message is likely conveyed beyond one’s victim regardless of one’s intent, be it to those targeted by violence or those who are like-minded, and this audience need not be national or international in scope.
Rather than attempting to resolve this tension, it is more useful to examine what the tension itself reveals about the definitional problem of terrorism. The lack of concrete distinction between hate crimes and terrorism, the fact that there is always a semblance of political motivation in hate crimes, further illustrates that identifying a political motive is not in itself satisfactory in recoding violence as terrorism. Again, we return to the existential, even if at first glance, situating Page therein poses a quandary. The prevalence and institutionalization of racist violence within the United States begs the question of how such actions could be recoded as threatening the very essence and structure of American society—save a disingenuous denial of white supremacy. By what means does the racist violence integral to the establishment of the United States return in the guise of a transformational threat?
The redefinition of white racist violence from a mainstay of American politics to terrorism occurs through a rereading of the racist right’s